The Bodley Head
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Elkin Mathews | |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
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Headquarters location | London |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
The Bodley Head is an English book
The Bodley Head launched
History
Originally named Elkin Mathews and John Lane, The Bodley Head was a partnership set up in 1887 by booksellers Elkin Mathews and John Lane, initially to trade in
Lane and Mathews began in 1894 to publish works of ‘stylish decadence’, including the notorious literary periodical The Yellow Book. Also notable amongst Bodley Head's pre-Great War books were the two volume sets: Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1910 and later editions, selling over fifty thousand copies), and Immanuel Kant, both by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Herbert George Jenkins was a manager at the firm during the first decade of the twentieth century, before leaving to set up his own publishing house in 1912.[2] The Bodley Head became a private company in 1921. In 1926 it published the Book of Bodley Head Verse, an anthology edited by J. B. Priestley. The firm published some mainstream popular authors such as Arnold Bennett and Agatha Christie and the book series, Twentieth Century Library (edited by V. K. Krishna Menon),[3][4] but ran into financial difficulties. Allen Lane, John Lane's nephew who had inherited control, left in 1936 to found Penguin Books. Before Allen Lane's new company was established, however, he published the first Penguins in 1935 under the imprint of The Bodley Head. Both "Penguin Books" and "The Bodley Head" appeared on the cover.
The Bodley Head continued after 1936 backed by a consortium of
The firm was bought in 1957 by Ansbacher & Co., headed by
The archives of The Bodley Head Ltd are kept at
Relaunch
The Bodley Head imprint was relaunched by Random House as an adult imprint in April 2008. Its two principal strands are stated to be books "of scholarship in both the humanities and sciences", and books which "contribute to the intellectual and cultural climate of our times".[8]
See also
Bibliography
- Stetz, Margaret; ISBN 0-87840-509-7.
- J. W. Lambert and Michael Ratcliffe The Bodley Head 1887–1987. The story of ISBN 0-370-30949-9.
References
- ^ "FOB: Firms Out of Business". norman.hrc.utexas.edu. Retrieved 13 December 2023.
- ^ "Obituaries - Mr Herbert Jenkins". The Times. 9 June 1923. p. 12. Retrieved 26 March 2012. (Subscription required for online access)
- ^ Sairam Krishnan, How a young man from Calicut became the publisher who helped change British thinking, scroll.in. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
- ^ Bodley Head, Making Britain: Discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950, open.ac.uk. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
- ^ The Publisher, Volumes 154-155 (1941), p. 260
- ^ "Archives of The Bodley Head Ltd – University of Reading". Reading.ac.uk. Retrieved 29 September 2013.
- ^ Archives of The Bodley Head Ltd, jisk.ac.uk. Retrieved 13 November 2018.
- ^ "Bodley Head". Vintage Books. Retrieved 29 September 2013.